12.1 The End of the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, and George H. W. Bush

This section is about how the United States used diplomacy and limited war as the Cold War ended—and why a president who presided over German unification and a short Persian Gulf victory still lost the White House. Treat George H. W. Bush (often called Bush 41 to distinguish him from his son) as a foreign-policy president whose New World Order rhetoric, United Nations coalition-building, and decision not to occupy Baghdad are tested together with the domestic story of "Read my lips", the 1990 budget deal, and the 1992 three-way election. Do not start the September 2001 attacks here; that rupture belongs to the next chapter.

1989 Revolutions and German Unification

In 1989, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev declined to send tanks to save Eastern European communist parties the way Moscow had in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). Solidarity in Poland formed a noncommunist government. Hungary opened its border. Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution toppled the party leadership. Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown and executed in December. The signature image for U.S. survey exams is the Berlin Wall opening on November 9, 1989, when East German authorities let crowds through the checkpoints and Berliners began dismantling the concrete that had split the city since 1961.

Unification was not automatic. The wartime victors still held reserved rights over Germany as a whole. In 1990 the two German states plus the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France negotiated the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany—the Two-Plus-Four agreement signed in Moscow on September 12, 1990. It ended Four-Power rights, provided for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from the former East over several years, and left a united Germany inside NATO. Formal unification followed on October 3, 1990. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker spent political capital reassuring Gorbachev that a larger Germany in NATO was compatible with Soviet security, while also reassuring European allies that Washington would stay engaged. If an item shows a 1990 map with one Germany and asks what diplomatic instrument cleared the occupation overlay, name Two-Plus-Four—not the 1945 Potsdam conference and not a U.S.–Soviet peace treaty that never existed.

Bush and Gorbachev also met at Malta in early December 1989, a summit often taught as the moment both sides signaled that the Cold War confrontation in Europe was ending even before the Soviet state itself vanished. START I, signed in Moscow on July 31, 1991, then reduced deployed strategic nuclear warheads—an arms-control bookend to Nixon-era SALT ceilings, not a claim that nuclear weapons disappeared.

The Soviet Collapse, December 1991

The Soviet Union outlasted the 1989 satellite revolutions by two years. A hard-line August 1991 coup against Gorbachev failed; Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic, emerged as the decisive opponent of the plotters. Union republics declared independence. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president. On December 26 the Soviet Union was formally dissolved and the Commonwealth of Independent States stood in for a vanished superpower. Fifteen successor states appeared; Russia inherited the U.N. Security Council seat and most of the nuclear arsenal. For exam chronology, keep three dates distinct: Wall, 1989; unification, October 1990; Soviet dissolution, December 1991. An option that dates the U.S.S.R.'s end to the day the Wall opened is the trap.

New World Order, Panama, and the Meaning of Unipolarity

Bush used the phrase New World Order in 1990–91 to mean a post–Cold War system in which aggression would be answered by collective security, a credible United Nations, and U.S. leadership rather than by a return to 1930s-style conquest. He did not mean a secret world government. The first large test of that language was not in Berlin but in the Persian Gulf. A smaller, earlier use of U.S. force came in Panama. On December 20, 1989, Bush launched Operation Just Cause to remove General Manuel Noriega, an indicted drug trafficker who had nullified an election and whose forces had killed a U.S. serviceman. President-elect Guillermo Endara was sworn in; Noriega surrendered on January 3, 1990, after taking refuge at the papal nunciature. Panama is a useful contrast item: a unilateral intervention justified as protecting Americans, the canal treaties' integrity, and democracy—not a U.N.-authorized liberation of a conquered neighbor.

Kuwait, Desert Shield, and Desert Storm

On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait, a small oil-rich emirate. Bush immediately condemned the invasion. The U.N. Security Council demanded withdrawal (Resolution 660) and imposed sanctions. Troops poured into Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Shield—the defensive buildup from August 1990 into January 1991, and the largest U.S. overseas deployment since Vietnam. On November 29, 1990, Resolution 678 authorized member states to use "all necessary means" if Iraq had not left Kuwait by January 15, 1991. Cuba and Yemen voted no; China abstained. That vote is the legal heart of the coalition story: this was not a solo U.S. police action dressed up after the fact.

Congress debated and, on January 12, 1991, authorized the use of force. Air and naval bombardment—Operation Desert Storm—began on January 17, 1991 (January 16 in Washington). For about five weeks the coalition hit Iraqi air defenses, command networks, and forces in Kuwait and Iraq. Iraq fired Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, hoping to split Arab partners from the coalition; Israeli non-retaliation, urged by Washington, helped hold Egypt, Syria, and the Gulf monarchies in the alliance. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf commanded the theater; Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney shaped a campaign that advertised air power, precision-guided munitions, and a short ground war. The ground offensive opened on February 24, 1991, liberated Kuwait, and smashed Iraqi units in a roughly 100-hour campaign. Bush announced a cease-fire on February 28.

More than two dozen countries contributed forces. Arab participation mattered politically: this was not framed as a Western war on Islam. Estimates of total coalition strength are often taught near three-quarters of a million personnel, the majority American. Do not confuse Desert Shield (the shield over Saudi Arabia and the buildup) with Desert Storm (the 1991 offensive). Do not confuse 1991 with the 2003 Iraq War, when a later administration did go to Baghdad.

Why the Coalition Stopped Short of Baghdad

Bush, Baker, and Powell chose not to occupy Baghdad or to hunt Saddam to the end. The U.N. mandate and the congressional authorization were built around liberating Kuwait, not regime change. Arab partners had not signed up for a U.S. occupation of Iraq. Officials feared Iraq would fracture along sectarian and ethnic lines, that urban fighting would produce high casualties, and that Washington would own a reconstruction it did not want—lessons filtered through Vietnam. A postwar uprising among Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north was crushed by the Iraqi army while coalition forces stood down; later no-fly zones and sanctions managed Saddam without removing him. If a question asks why 1991 ended at the Kuwaiti border, start with the limited mandate and coalition politics, not with a claim that the United States lacked the military power to continue.

"Read My Lips," the 1990 Budget, and the 1992 Election

At the 1988 Republican National Convention Bush pledged "Read my lips: no new taxes." Facing a large deficit and a Democratic Congress, he signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 on November 5, 1990, a package that combined spending restraint with tax increases, including a higher gasoline tax and a higher top income-tax rate. Conservatives treated the deal as a broken vow; many voters remembered the slogan more than the deficit arithmetic. A recession dated by the National Bureau of Economic Research from mid-1990 into early 1991, followed by a jobless recovery, made foreign-policy success feel remote in industrial and suburban districts. Bush had also signed major 1990 statutes that are sometimes listed among his domestic credits—the Americans with Disabilities Act and Clean Air Act amendments—but those did not repair the tax-pledge wound.

Democrat Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas, ran as a New Democrat on growth, jobs, and the slogan his war room popularized: "It's the economy, stupid." Independent Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire, attacked the deficit and later NAFTA, warning of a "giant sucking sound" of jobs heading to Mexico. In November 1992 Clinton won a plurality of the popular vote—about 43 percent to Bush's 37 percent and Perot's 19 percent—and a clear Electoral College majority (370 to 168). Perot took no electoral votes. High approval after Desert Storm in 1991 did not survive the domestic verdict of 1992. A realistic item might give you those three percentages and ask what the result showed: a three-way split in which a Democrat could win the presidency without a popular-vote majority, not a landslide mandate on the scale of 1972 or 1984, and not a Perot electoral-vote bloc that threw the race into the House.